I just came across your interesting Blog on Strachey and wanted to tell you that you can find my MUC emulator running the loveletter source code from 1952 @ http://alpha60.de/research/muc/ You will need JAVA to access the realtime simulation…

http://www.andrew-campbell.com

A Fluorescent Pink Lavatory Brush…

Do people know of other digital art timelines, or claims about the first digital art? I have the feeling that many folks start with Csuri.

I tend to teach about the history of new media arts in streams by each arts type over time. There are guides for specific arts types but not really ones with all of them. I’ve been contemplating commissioning a flash artist to put together a visual database where the streams can be turned on or off and all can be juxtaposed with technical milestones as well as conceptual. Given the excellent work both yourself and Nick did on the New Media Reader — perhaps this is a task for you guys?

Here are some timelines I’ve utlised, there are heaps more but these are at hand:

The Electronic Labyrinth
Videotopia
History of Home Video Games
The Media History Porject Timeline
Timeline of Knowledge Representation
Media Profiles Timeline
A Linguistic history of videogame

The jazzy interface types, that refer to digital media arts:
Margot Lovejoy’s Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age
D.DaCosta’s Influences

And I thought the H-Bot: the Automated Historical Fact-Finder was fun.

Jeremy, in terms of where we might look for claims as to when digital art began — it’s not a bad question. For Paul and Wilson’s books I just flipped through, looking for the earliest dates I could find. Looking online, I found this timeline, which begins in 1956 (a date apparently chosen because of its use by Jasia Reichardt):
http://www.dam.org/history/

Do people know of other digital art timelines, or claims about the first digital art? I have the feeling that many folks start with Csuri.

Michael, I have good news about the program still being around for the love letter generator. David Durand has done some sleuthing in Strachey’s papers, and the whole thing is there. If the Baby and Mark I were sufficiently similar, perhaps it wouldn’t be much work (using some of the material from the 50th anniversary pages to which you linked) to get the first piece of digital art running in emulation!

Matt, thanks for the kind words and teaser… looking forward to _Mechanisms._

I hadn’t realized Martin Campbell-Kelley was Strachey’s biographer; he’s also written a good book on the history of software (from MIT).

For anyone interested in the tradition of analog computation (circa WWII), Paul Edwards is excellent in The Closed World.

I believe I’ve documented a new media “first” of my own in my upcoming _Mechanisms_, but I’ll let it go at just that teaser for now. ;-)

The first digital artist? “Christopher Strachey is rightly viewed as a pioneer of modern computing. He’s not usually, however, viewed as the creator of the first work of digital literature. Research toward my submission for DAC, however, has lead me…

First, however, a brief note about Turing and literature. In the Hodges biography the point is made that Turing wasn’t a fan of literature in general — but apparently those literary works that appealed were quite important to him. For example, Hodges quotes Lyn Newman (p. 475) as writing that she

pushed first Anna Karenina and then War and Peace into his hands. I knew that he read Jane Austen and Trollope as sedatives, but he was totally uninterested in poetry and not particularly sensitive to literature or any of the arts, and therefore not at all an easy person to supply with reading matter. War and Peace proved to be in a very special way the masterpiece for him and he wrote to me expressing moving terms his appreciation of Tolstoy’s understanding and insight. Alan had recognized himself and his own problems in War and Peace and Tolstoy had gained a new reader of a moral stature and complexity and an originality of spirit equal to his own.

To complicate the picture further, Hodges’s biography also quotes from fiction written by Turing…

Your post reminds me of a few reasons why historians of new media should try to establish who was the “first” at something. At times it seems like figuring this out amounts to awarding some laurel at a silly contest, but there are a few good reasons to investigate what the first work in a form was, some of which Jeremy Douglas mentions in his follow-up post on WRT. I’ll offer two others: For one thing, we should document who was first for the same reason we document who was second, third, and so on, up to the most recent. To not care about who was first is like not caring about any other aspect of new media history. We should consider the story of the first digital artwork to be at least as interesting as the story of any digital artwork. For another, when we find a “first” that has been overlooked, as Noah has done here, this allows us to ask why it was overlooked, and to learn about how history has been framed and understood so far.

It’s interesting to see how the presentation of Christopher Strachey’s love letter generator differed from that of a new media first I documented in Twisty Little Passages: Leonardo Torres Quevedo’s 1912 invention of the first computer game, a chess-playing automaton capable of playing out an endgame against a human opponent. While Torres’s invention was not programmed on a general-purpose computer, it was a digital computing system that followed an algorithm and responded to input from a player. In 1914, Torres took this first video game to Paris for a flamboyant public demonstration – the equivalent of today’s E3. Strachey’s literary system, on the other hand, was described in an art journal.

There might be interesting “queer readings” Strachey’s love letter generator, although I’m not convinced of that yet. (An attempt to exhaustively occupy every possible position, as in Barthes’s reading of de Sade?) But, not to put it too bluntly, queers can simply write about love. They aren’t constrained to only write about queerness. Auden’s “Lullaby” is a poem about love (”universal love”) that can only suffer from a reading that assumes it is about something else, something that isn’t universal. Strachey’s love letter generator, although it’s certainly in a different register, may be similar. To me, it embodies a sense of overflowing, that everything must be said to the beloved, but that only one thing can be said at a time – not something that is specific to any gender or sexual orientation.

Finally, to argue against this last “reading” of the love-letter machine a bit, I have to ask how seriously we can take it. I resist the idea is that literature may only be created by those who are certified literature-makers. Some would claim that Eliza, for instance, isn’t literary, despite simulating a character, enacting parody, etc., because Weizenbaum wasn’t part of a literary tradition. I don’t find this position tenable. But I think it’s worth asking whether something like Strachey’s love letter generator is actually anti-literature, a prank meant to mock the idea of writing and literary creation rather than to contribute to literary art. Of all previous machines, real and imagined, it most resembles one offered as a parody of writing by Johnathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels:

a Frame … twenty Foot square, placed in the middle of the Room. The Superficies was composed of several Bits of Wood, about the bigness of a Die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender Wires. These bits of Wood were covered on every Square with Paper pasted on them, and on these Papers were written all the Words of their Language, in their several Moods, Tenses, and Declensions, but without any Order.

Was Strachey’s disdain for literature as great as Turing’s was said to have been, despite (or perhaps due to) Strachey’s having literary neighbors in Bloomsbury? I believe it’s written somewhere – I recall this from an undergraduate class on Turing that I took, but can’t think of the source – that Turing was aggressively anti-literary, so much so that his father was delighted when Turing told him there was, at least, one line of Hamlet that he actually liked. His father asked what it was. “The last,” Turing said. “Exeunt, bearing off the bodies.”

I think it does matter if this program was intended as a mockery of literature, although, even then, I’ll admit that it might be of literary value – the poets who perpetrated the Ern Malley hoax on the journal Angry Penguins demonstrated that the most ill-intentioned efforts can yield literary outcomes; perhaps a hoaxing programmer could do the same. It would make for an interesting origin myth for computer literature.

On the other hand I’m not so sure citing Wilson’s Information Arts as an example of what is being updated here – I flipped through the front-matter and the section on Digital Informations Systems / Computers, and Wilson is pretty clear that the book “focuses on art that addresses research activity in the last seven years.”

Are there more concrete examples of timelines we should be updating? Has anyone else offered strong cases for “first” digital art or digital literature, that we can consider by comparison?